Wonder, Refuge, Promise: Explorations and Discoveries of America in Maria Irene Fornes' Final Plays

Abstract

Five hundred years after Christopher Columbus' voyage to the Indies, scholar John Brushwood delineated the three main offerings of America as presented in Spanish-American literature: wonder, promise and refuge. Maria Irene Fornes' dramatic collection, Letters from Cuba and Other Plays (2007), includes three pieces that correspond to the last stage of her long career as a playwright. The trilogy presents different versions of America at the turn of the millennium, all of which share the motif of the voyage across the Atlantic, although the three journeys vary in direction, length, and implications. The article argues that, despite the obvious differences in style, tone, and theme, these plays respond to preoccupations about the meaning of "discovery" and "exploration" facilitated or triggered by the Atlantic. The effective use of palimpsest, hybridity, and simultaneity as instruments for exploration in each of the three texts, combined with the concepts that Brushwood proposes, render a new cartography for the notion of America at the end of the twentieth century.